Fronted or In-Situ? Wh-Question Strategies and Acceptability in Icibemba: A Minimalist Analysis

This article examines wh-question formation in Icibemba, a Bantu language spoken in Zambia. Using a Minimalist framework, I investigate how locality constraints interact with speakers’ acceptability judgments. The data come from elicitation tasks, grammaticality judgment tasks, and audio recordings collected in two secondary schools in Mungwi District. The results show that Icibemba wh-questions follow systematic structural constraints rather than free variation. Fronted ni-based wh-questions are strongly preferred in formal contexts. In-situ and non-canonical order questions are only accepted in specific oral discourse settings. Participants’ judgments reveal clear sensitivity to locality conditions, argument role identification, and the structural position of the wh-expression. These findings support Phase Theory and the Phase Impenetrability Condition as mechanisms that explain wh-dependencies in Bantu. At the same time, they reveal how formal syntactic constraints interact with discourse-pragmatic factors. Icibemba offers useful evidence for the feature-driven nature of wh-movement and the role of locality in licensing interrogative dependencies.